Spectres are haunting downtown Los Angeles. Giant obelisks rise like polished
headstones over the burial plots of former communities. Most people are unaware that
downtown Los Angeles is a graveyard of social relations, let alone that the spirits walk
among them. But they do sense that something is fundamentally out of joint. Many feel out
of place, threatened and insecure, or simply bored by the absence of particulars in the
unyielding sameness of the skyscraper landscape. This graphical essay examines forms of
alienation at two contiguous modernist landmarks, the "Four Level" Interchange
and Bunker Hill, considering them as part of a complex spacetime fabric where the present,
the past, the near, and the far away can be made visible or invisible.[1]

In Los Angeles, the prosaic and the fantastic have literally interchanged at the
intersections of the Four Level and Bunker Hill, bringing together the worlds of
capitalist development, Hollywood science fiction, World War and Cold War, international
migration, and the idylls of a family neighborhood.

The metropolis of Los Angeles embodies dreams of freedom in a myriad of forms. An
immigrant cosmopolis of titanic proportions, global entrepôt and factory for the culture
industry, Los Angeles is also a signal site of modernist urban design, planning, and
practice. Its freeways are justifiably seen as central to Los Angeles's contribution to
civilization. But the freeways also embody the deepest of contradictions. These ways are
"free" from interruption by traffic lights and pedestrians, but they are also an
attempt to break free from society itself. No social relations detain the commuter, and
neither do any particulars of historical social development. The attempted universal of
the freeway resides in the familiar sameness of the lanes, signage, rules for entrance and
exit, even in the peculiar, colorless shade of freeway concrete.[2] Yet
the universal, functional aesthetic of high modernism can only temporarily abolish the
spontaneous profusion of the unique and particular--those unplanned social relations that
people form in the everyday.[3]

Freedom is a mighty abstraction; the freeway is a colossal, concrete reality. The ride
down the exit ramp is a ride back to Earth--to society as it exists in history. Greeting
the "citizens" (what the folks living on the street call everyone else); are the
"homeless" (what the folks who have regular jobs, houses and apartments call
those who live outdoors). Few drivers are aware that the men and women who panhandle at
the freeway ramps typically live under those very freeways. These are the living
trolls-under-the-bridge of the folk tales. They ask for tribute when you pass through
their small and humble domain. Meet Ron Wells, Joseph Guajardo, Curtis, and "You Can
Call Me Whatever You Want."[4]

Unsettled by such sights, "citizens" project their own fears onto these
seeming apparitions. The modern self, independent, secure, and potent, depends upon its
Other, and the "homeless" are as close to that Other as any citizen has ever
faced. Of course, freedom is not so simple as the possession of secure, creative autonomy,
and "citizens" desperately avoid actual recognition of the "homeless"
as selves, lest they be brought face to face with their own lack of freedom. The
"citizen" self is dependent upon a myriad of social props and cannot escape its
relations with this "homeless" other. That "citizen" self takes refuge
in modernity's reassuring ideologies about equal opportunity for those who labor honestly.
It finds perpetual balm in the universal mass culture of comfort, consumption, and
leisure. Like roadmap in the glove compartment, these ideologies aid the escape from
recognition.[5]

Several types of "distance" separate "citizens" from
"homeless" and all people from their social selves. Geometric, spatial distance
can be measured in meters or feet. Time distance is also measurable, against the clock and
the calendar. But each of these distances shrinks and expands in our minds as a function
of social relations. The phenomenon is known as "social distance": a feeling of
farness or nearness to other persons and other groups. Distant social relations are alien
ones, and the process of pushing social others into the distance of time or space is the
process of alienation.[6]

The alienated souls who inhabit our landscapes can be made visible through critical
acts of the imagination. Image 2 combines two photographic records of precisely the
same homesite under the Figueroa bridge of the northbound Hollywood Freeway, in 1935 and
1998. The "homeless" man is "out of place" in the same sense that the
1935 family home is "out of time." To be "homeless" is not to have a
recognized social place. That the family was Mexican (or Mexican-American) placed them in
an alien political category when the freeways were planned in the 1940s.[7]

Image 2

Precisely the same Homesite: Figueroa Street under the Hollywood-Santa
Ana Freeway in 1999 and (Before the Freeway) 1935.

A houseless man in 1999
strides past two girls who just returned home from parochial school in 1935.

The urban social fabric can be conceived as a dense and historically complex network of
intersections, between the major and minor, public and private, cultural, economic, and
political institutions that comprise the entire society. Image 3 renders some of
these threads in a fabric of images, "Figueroa Spectres, 1935  1999."

Image 3

Figueroa-Spectres, 1935-1999.

Figueroa St. between Boston
Street and Temple St (Beneath the Four Level Interchange). Top two layers correlate
spatially along the east side of Figueroa: 1999 and 1935, respectively. Third layer is
comprised of images both sides of Figueroa, 1999. Bottom three layers correlate spatially,
on the west side of Figueroa: 1940, 1935, and 1999, respectively.

The Four Level Interchange in Downtown Los Angeles is where the Hollywood-Santa Ana (US
101) and the Harbor-Pasadena (US 110) freeways intersect. It marks the point where the
name of US 101 changes from "Hollywood" to "Santa Ana," and where US
110 changes from the "Harbor" to the "Pasadena." The Four Level is
thus the original "Downtown" freeway intersection, the freeways gaining their
names from the destinations outward from this point.[8]

In the first half of this century the whole of Downtown Los Angeles west of the Los
Angeles River was still a relatively unbroken fabric of social relations, practiced daily
along the streets and sidewalks. How part of this region appeared from the sky in 1945,
1948 (just after construction of the Four Level began) and 1996, can be inspected in the
time-geographic series of images:

Image 4

Aerial Photo of Future Sites of Four Level Interchange and Bunker Hill, 1948.

This 1948 image correlates
spatially with Image 5 (1996). Index "A" indicates the Ghost Neighborhood site
of the houseless community under the Four level Interchange (See Images 1-3). Index
"B" indicates the Ghost Neighborhood site of the 3rd Street retail district on
old Bunker Hill, prior to its demolition beginning in 1961 (See Image 8). Bright areas
show where demolition clearing for the Four Level Interchange had begun. Sunset Boulevard
was the major East-West Route for the northern portion of Los Angeles prior to the
construction of the Hollywood-Santa Ana Freeway (US 101) in the 1940s and the Santa Monica
Freeway (US 10) in the 1960s. Figueroa Boulevard (along with the Arroyo Seco Parkway) was
the major North-South route for the region prior to the construction of the Harbor and
Pasadena Freeways (US 110).

Credit: USGS EROS Data Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Image 5

Aerial Photo of Four Level Interchange and Bunker Hill, 1996.

Comparison
with Image 4 shows the massive extent of neighborhood demolition since the Second World
War. Sites "A" and "B" correspond precisely in Images 4 and 5. The
Four Level Interchange bounds the new Bunker Hill, replacing approximately 90% of the
residential structures visible in the 1948 image. Sunset Boulevard now passes over the
Harbor-Pasadena Freeway and Figueroa Street passes under the Hollywood-Santa Ana, but the
Figueroa-Sunset intersection, once a major crossroads tying together many Los Angeles
neighborhoods, is now nearly lifeless.

Credit: Aerial FotoBank, San Diego, California.

The Four Level Interchange may seem to commuters a desolate and noisy stack of
reinforced concrete, but it is also a residential community. At least 100
"homeless" (actually "houseless") live under the various bridge spans
of the Four Level Interchange,[9] among them
Joseph Guajardo, who has actually lived within a few blocks of the Four Level since his
birth in 1947. In Image 6Joseph Guajardo stands
within the ghost image of his boyhood home on Fremont. The site was at that moment claimed
by the houseless gentleman seen to the right.

Image 6

Ghost Home of Joseph Guajardo, 1940 and 1999.

Joseph
Guajardo stands in front of his boyhood home at the former address of 412 North Fremont
Street (between Temple and the Hollywood-Santa Ana Freeway). Inset is a 1940 WPA drawing
of the entire block, as Guajardo knew it as a child. The home directly under his feet, and
shown life-size around him, was his own. Another houseless man was claiming this site at
the time. Guajardo's current abode under the Four Level is barely visible over his right
shoulder in the background, beneath the freeway signs.

The first high-speed freeway interchange in the world, Los Angeles' Four Level
Interchange opened fully for traffic on 22 September 1953, and made in that same year its
cinematic debut, in George Pal's Paramount Pictures classic War of the Worlds,
based on H.G. Wells novel of 1898.[10] When the Four Level opened, it
fulfilled the visions displayed at General Motors' "Futurama" exhibit of the
1939 New York World's Fair, designed by Norman Bel Geddes. The Futurama exhibit was a
nineteenth-century diorama recast as a futuristic movie set. Bel Geddes, until then
primarily a Broadway set designer, depicted elevated freeways on which commuters could
rocket from home to work and back without stopping at scores of stoplights, pedestrian
crosswalks, and other street-level annoyances. Futurama visitors were given a pin, which
read "I Have Seen the Future." That future was supposed to be 1960. Bel Geddes
was projecting the modernist aesthetic of planned urban landscapes conceived to accelerate
movement and cleanse the old built environment of its irrationality.[11]

Visitors to New York's Futurama in 1939 hovered in guided cars above a giant model
depicting the future, presented as serious entertainment. In that same year, planners and
designers converged to build a giant model of Los Angeles, into which the modernist vision
was soon to be inserted by another set of designer-planners, including the architect
brothers William and Hal Pereira, both also Art Directors for Paramount Films.

Adjacent to the Four-Level freeway icon of late modernity stands Bunker Hill, about 200
feet lower in altitude than it stood in the 1950s, before the bulldozers began, in 1961,
to scrape it clean and top it off to make way for the proudly sterile assemblage of office
towers (Wells Fargo Tower, IBM Tower, Library (First Interstate) Tower, Arco Tower, Bank
of America Tower, etc), condominiums, and fine arts centers (Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper
Forum, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Museum of Contemporary Art, etc.) that stand there
today.[12] This massive redevelopment project, still underway today (1999) with the
imminent construction of the Disney Concert Hall and the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Our
Lady of the Angels, has also fulfilled decades of plans dating from the 1920s, when
downtown business leaders first looked enviously upon the immigrant, mixed-race
neighborhood of Bunker Hill.[13]

The actual conquest (redevelopment) was delayed until the 1930s and 40s, the years of
modernism's apogee. Scientific planners created, in Gaston Bachelard's words,
"indifferent space subject to the measurements and estimates of the surveyor."[14]
During the New Deal, state bureaucracies coldly abstracted the social space around them,
officially classifying millions of persons by racial or class categories during an era of
massive redevelopment that did not slow down until the late 1970s.

Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the
beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with
envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.[15]

In their radio script for the 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds for Mercury
Radio Theater, Howard Koch and Orson Welles registered and protested the modernist
invasion of living spaces, linking it to the fascist threat abroad. The infamous panic of
so many listeners can only indicate that they felt that threat very close to home.[16]
What did the modernist planners regard with envious eyes? Image 8
re-imagines the daily heart of a once-thriving neighborhood, composed of the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) model (1940) of downtown Los Angeles and also documentary
images made in the 1950s.

Image 8

The Heart of Bunker Hill, 1940 and 1957.

Third Street
between Olive and Grand was the central shopping block for residents of the hill from the
late 19th century through the late 1950s. Begin reading this composition
clockwise from the lower left frame, which is a detail of the 1940 Model of Los Angeles
viewed from the northwest. The path of the Harbor-Pasadena Freeway would later be in the
foreground of that frame. The alignment of old Bunker Hill to the old Central Business
District is easy to visualize in this frame. The upper left frame is a detail showing the
corner of Third and Olive, which is the same street corner in the arc of frames that
should be read read from top to bottom along the right side of this composition. Theodore
Hall took these latter four images in 1957 to simulate a shopper walking into the Budget
Basket Complete Food Market.

Third Street between Olive and Grand was the central place where Bunker Hill residents
did their daily rounds of errands, visiting their familiar grocery stores, newsstands, and
cleaners.

The images in the arc on the right side of the image were made in 1957 by an amateur
photographer named Theodore Hall, who lived on the Hill and had full knowledge that
redevelopment plans were underway to raze the sites he photographed. Hall consciously
simulated a hypothetical resident's point-of-view during a stroll into the Budget Basket
Complete Food Market. Reading clockwise, Hall titled Frame 1 "the Hill's Business
Center:" it begins the series at the corner of Grand. Frame 2, which Hall titled
"Street Scene" is shot from the north side of Third toward the subjects depicted
in Frame 3, which Hall annotated as "'Red," well-known newspaper vendor on West
3rd, near Grand." Finally, Hall entered the Budget Basket and held his
camera low, behind the back of a young girl buying milk from a well-seasoned liquor
dealer. The contrast of the little girl surrounded by so many commodities of adult vice
may be read as Hall's sympathetic but bittersweet and Noir-influenced understanding of
this neighborhood. For, as Hall took these shots, a furious debate was raging over the
desirability or necessity of razing this neighborhood. When the bulldozers finally began
to remove it, in 1961, nearly 10,000 persons called it home.

While the sentimental images by Theodore Hall are paeans to a fated lifeworld, the 1940
WPA model is an artifact of bureaucratic gigantism and the machinery of redevelopment that
located targets for massive structural eradication, human displacement, and expropriation.
Thousands of house-by-house drawings by WPA-employed artists became patterns for
model-builders, and the model became the planning base for a vast apparatus of design
firms, federal, state and local planning authorities, the city engineering department, and
construction firms.[17]

That three-dimensional model stands for other "models" or representations, of
many different genres that together constituted the social distance explored here.
Creators of 1930s Noir fiction, New Deal home refinancing bureaucrats, and real estate
agents, worked together with city planners, often without really knowing it, to alienate
whole populations (and ultimately themselves). Far from annihilating them, however, this
collective agency embedded these aliens in the landscape.

In order to evict and destroy Bunker Hill, planners needed to constitute this as a
worthless place with people to match, and this representation is nowhere more succinctly
drawn than by the master of Noir, Raymond Chandler, from his novel The High Window (1942).
He calls it an "old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.... In the tall rooms
haggard landladies bicker with shift tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching
their cracked shoes into the sun, sit old men with faces like lost battles..."[18]
The Community Redevelopment Agency had the authority to demolish whole neighborhoods, but
only if they could successfully designate such neighborhoods as "slums." Was
Bunker Hill a slum? The Apartment Association of Los Angeles (composed of apartment owners,
not dwellers) vigorously opposed the Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project and specifically
contested the "slum" designation in 1956, funding a counter-study that showed,
of a total 142 buildings "only 21 whose future is questionable."[19]

Analogous to San Francisco's Nob Hill, Bunker Hill had been a prime location for the
wealthy to roost during the boom cycles of the 1880s and 1890s. Soon, however, the noise
and tumult of the rapidly expanding city below, along with the allurements of estate-style
living in the developing peripheral districts, drew the ruling class away from this
neighborhood. By the 1920s and 1930s, the homes were primarily used as rental property,
catering to immigrants from Mexico and Europe. Even as plans to raze Bunker Hill
crystallized in the mid-1950s, developers were rehabilitating the sturdy Victorian and
Edwardian homes, boasting that the tall stone foundations and first-growth redwood timbers
had preserved the structural integrity of these buildings.[20]

Why, then, tear all of this down? Who chose these neighborhoods for wrecking ball and
bulldozer? Specific agents made the future of this area highly questionable by creating a
very damaging representation of it in explicitly racial terms. During the late 1930s, the
Roosevelt Administration undertook a racial mapping project of colossal proportions.[21]
In order to establish a method for assessing the security risk to mortgages on specific
parcels of residential property, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) recruited local
"experts" (real estate agents) in every community of the United States to write
detailed descriptions and to draw detailed maps so that every square inch of the settled
space of the United States would have a "security grade," from "A" to
"D." Each of these grades would also wear a color: Green for A; Blue for B;
Yellow for C; Red for D. These maps were kept secret, except to bankers and HOLC
officials, and from them originated the notorious "redlining" practices, named
after the D-graded neighborhoods. One such map, for Los Angeles from the ocean to the Los
Angeles River, is reproduced in Image 9

Image 9

Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) Security Map, 1939.

The
Federal Government's New Deal program to save homes from foreclosure by refinancing them
was facilitated by the assembly of these maps, which gave assessors and loan officers a
systematic method for establishing the "security risk" of every neighborhood in
the United States. Although concerned with property values, this became a racial mapping
project of colossal proportions, because the first criterion used to distinguish
"good" from "bad' neighborhoods was race. Thus, the "redlined"
areas in this map are the racially mixed neighborhoods.

Although overtly conceived as a project to distinguish "good" from
"bad" neighborhoods in terms of mere property values, the HOLC security zones
mapping project rested on one overriding criterion for assessing property value: race. It
would be hard to exaggerate the obsession with race held by the planners of Los Angeles
spatial redevelopment during the 1930s and 1940s, when the pathways of the freeways and
the Bunker Hill redevelopment were conceived. Racially mixed neighborhoods were the
Carthage that, in the minds of the planners, needed to be destroyed, or at least
contained. "Subversive racial elements predominate," reads a typical passage
from the Federal Home Loan Administration's "security map" description of Bunker
Hill in 1939 (officially, Area D-37): "dilapidation and squalor are everywhere in
evidence. It is a slum area and one of the city's melting pots." "Melting
Pot," especially since the time of the Kennedy Administration has usually had a
positive connotation. Prior to that celebration of a "nation of immigrants,"
however, "melting pot" was clearly a dirty euphemism for "blight," at
least among planners.

At many places, the words of the authors are manifestly contradictory, praising in one
breath the objective qualities of a neighborhood, and then in the next, condemning it for
its racial otherness: "Conveniences are all readily available," reads the
description of Central Avenue (Area D-52). The next sentence reads: "this is the
'melting pot' of Los Angeles, and has long been thoroughly blighted. The Negro population
is in the eastern two-thirds of the area . . . Population is uniformly of poor quality and
many improvements are in a state of dilapidation." We must ask, what exactly is a
"poor quality" population? The phrasing is unambiguous: it does not read
"poor population." It was written in 1938 and belongs to a common discourse of
power in the West that generated aliens and alienation.[22]

Specific historic agents--real estate agents--constructed these spaces within a clear
political process. In short they "raced" space deliberately. And this process
was no mere matter of quantifiable demographics. Nearly every block of Los Angeles that
was graded "Red" due to "subversive racial elements" was in truth heterogeneous
and usually majority white. Interestingly enough, only eight percent (8.3 to be exact)
of the families in the 33 residential blocks of the redlined Bunker Hill Area D-37 were
actually classified as non-white, according to the maps created by a survey taken by the
Los Angeles County Housing Authority in collaboration with the WPA. It may be worth noting
that the color chosen by the real estate establishment to underscore the
"subversive" or alien quality of these zones was red.[23]

We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various
concerns, they were scrutinized and studied: perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a
microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of
water.[24]

The movie version of War of the Worlds was produced by George Pal, the great
founder of stop-action animation, who had escaped from the Nazis in 1939. In Pal's 1953
production the Martians reach Earth inside huge cylinders containing streamlined, Manta
Ray-shaped flying machines, which immediately and without any explanation begin destroying
Los Angeles. "The inhabitants of Mars, it seems," reads a review of the movie's
premiere in Cue, "having run out of lebensraum on their own dying
planet, cast about for a nice new world to settle."[25]

Paramount had planned to produce War of the Worlds as World War and then Cold
War allegory for several decades. Pal's Martians were informed by his personal experience
fleeing Nazi destruction. The Art Directors for War of the Worlds were Albert
Nozaki, who created the Martian spaceships (Image 10), and Hal Pereira, who created
the miniature model of Los Angeles so convincingly destroyed by the "heat rays"
of the invading spaceships.[26] Nozaki had been fired by Paramount
the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and interned at Manzanar concentration camp for
the duration of the war. The theme of racial alienation in the film must certainly have
resonated in him as well.[27] Hal Pereira had succeeded his
brother William Pereira as Paramount's chief Art Director. William Pereira, who massively
transformed the landscape of Los Angeles, was equally at home designing movie sets as he
was designing the urban milieu. He produced two films, was Art Director on four others,
and shared an Academy Award with Cecil B. DeMille in 1942 for the special effects in Paramount's
Reap the Wild Wind, starring Claudette Colbert and John Wayne. He may be the only
person to have won American Institute of Architects' coveted Golden Scarab Award and also
an Academy Award.[28]

By the early 1950s, as Hal Pereira built and destroyed one model of Los Angeles, his
brother William, now the head of an international architecture and planning firm, used the
WPA's 1940 model of Los Angeles to plan the destruction of Bunker Hill. William Pereira
later fittingly chose a landing spaceship as the "Theme building" (Image 11)
for the Los Angeles International Airport (completed 1961).

Image 10

Publicity Artwork by Albert Nozaki, War of the Worlds
(Paramount, 1953).

Nozaki designed the famous Manta Ray shaped Martian space
ships, which systematically annihilate buildings and Humans alike. The themes of War of
the Worlds must have resonated deeply with Nozaki, who was "relocated" in
1942 from Los Angeles to the Manzanar concentration camp. He was later (1949) also
prevented from living in the progressive modernist Crestwood Hills residential experiment
because of his race.

Echoing the Martian invaders in War
of the Worlds, for which his brother Hal Pereira's was Art Director with Albert
Nozaki, William Pereira's "theme" for the new Los Angeles International Airport
was a landing spaceship. Calling this "the first terminal area specifically designed
for the jet age," FAA Administrator Najeeb E. Halaby predicted at its opening that
the new airport "may well achieve some of the worldwide renown . . . as--who
knows--Disneyland." (Los Angeles Examiner 26 June 1961).

These worlds of creation, destruction, and creative destruction came together when the
Four-level interchange made its cinematic debut in Pal's 1953 War of the Worlds, as
(alienated) Angelenos flee the invading aliens across its newly-completed spans.[29]
In the 1898, 1938, and 1953 versions of The War of the Worlds, Martians bridge
immense spatial distances, which stand for the immense social distances that allow one
species or nation or racial group remorselessly to annihilate or expropriate another.[30]

William Pereira was the quintessential Cold War architect of aerospace-age Los Angeles.
After training by Chicago's leading modernists in the 1930s, Pereira designed movie
theatres and film sets for Paramount Films. A "whiz kid" of Halberstam's best
and the brightest generation, he moved easily between the federal government, the
art-design-architecture world, and large corporate projects. In 1942 he was an assistant
director of the Office of Civilian Defense, in charge of "property protection,
directing camouflage work." In 1950 Pereira joined with the "wonder boy of sales
promotion," Charles Luckman, the young president of the Lever Soap Company, to
establish a global firm specializing in huge projects. While designing the new modernist
landscape for Bunker Hill in the 1950s, Pereira and Luckman master-planned the Cape
Canaveral missile base and the $300,000,000 NATO air and naval base in Franco's Spain.[31]

Standing under the spaceship-inspired Theme Building on 25 June 1961, Vice President
Lyndon B. Johnson ominously began his dedication of Pereira and Luckman's new Los Angeles
International Airport during the Berlin Wall crisis, with a stern warning to Premier
Nikita Khrushchev not "to underestimate the United States' determination to honor its
pledges to the brave and freedom-loving people of West Berlin."[32]
In the previous month, the Community Redevelopment Agency accelerated its use of a
$42.7 million loan from the Federal government to purchase all the private property on
Bunker Hill. Eviction of the more than 9,000 Bunker Hill residents had begun.[33]
They joined the thousands already displaced by the construction of the Harbor and
Hollywood Freeways in the previous decade. Not long after the celluloid Martians destroyed
the aging structures of Bunker Hill, bulldozers and wrecking balls began to accomplish the
concrete task. Joseph Guajardo has been fleeing ever since, ironically taking up residence
under the very freeways that destroyed his home.

All institutions, no matter how global, ideological, and imaginary, regardless of the
countless and unrecorded ordinary acts that reproduce them, must be anchored somewhere in
space and time. The Four Level and Bunker Hill redevelopments both anchored and embedded a
phase of alienation that "radiates disaster triumphant" from those very sites a
full half century later, forming an "interchange" between the great forces of
history and the banal movements of daily life.[34]

IMAGE 13

Alienating Los Angeles, 1949-1953.

Martian space ship from
George Pal's War of the Worlds (Paramount, 1953), attacks Los Angeles. Bureau of
Engineering oblique aerial taken in 1949 shows the colossal destruction of neighborhoods
underway, to clear the path for the Hollywood-Santa Ana Freeway and the Four Level
Interchange. This photo looks due West along Sunset Blvd. In the foreground is "La
Placita," the historic core of Spanish and Mexican Los Angeles.

Ghost neighborhoods haunt these ruptured landscapes and torment their houseless
residents. The haunting resides in the failure to recognize the social other, and the
torment is fixed in the concrete. Torn from the social fabric, these remnants defiantly
stand their ground and confront the "citizens" with their "homeless"
souls. Further interventions into the historical process must attempt to make the
estranged familiar. "The task to be accomplished," wrote Max Horkheimer and
Theodore Adorno in Los Angeles, 1944: "is not the conservation of the past, but the
redemption of the hopes of the past."[35]

Acknowledgements

This essay and the larger work of which it is a part was made possible in part by the
generous support of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the
Humanities, and by the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, and the University of
Southern California ISLA Digital Archive.

For reading and criticizing earlier drafts, thanks to Robbert Flick, Suzanne Loizeaux,
Carol Mangione, Martin Meeker, Jérôme Monnet, Steve Ross, Matt Roth, Michael Roth,
Charles Salas, the members of the 1996-7 Getty Research Institute Perspectives on Los
Angeles Seminar, and the members of the Los Angeles Social History Study Group. I also
wish to thank Suzanne Loizeaux of UCLA for her highly productive research assistance and
constant conceptual challenges, as well as Dan Gebler and Anne Marie Kooistra of USC for
their valuable empirical contributions. Thanks also to Matt Roth of the Automobile Club of
Southern California, for sharing his incomparable knowledge of the LA freeway system.
Thanks to Ron Wells and Joseph Guajardo for introducing me to their community. Special
thanks to Richard Harris of McMaster University and Becky Nicolaides of UCSD for sharing
their original National Archives sources with me. The archival materials used in this
graphic essay are only accessible thanks to the tremendous work by some very fine
archivists. I wish to thank especially Hynda Rudd, Los Angeles City Records Manager, and
Jay Jones in her department; Jennifer Watts, Curator of Photographs and the Huntington
Library; and Dace Taube, Regional History Archive, University of Southern California.
Special thanks also to Bill Ashdowne, Los Angeles City Records office, who discovered the
Bureau of Engineering "Photographic Record of Construction Work" series in the
Los Angeles City Archives in 1997. Thanks to Beth Werling and Richard Meier of the Los
Angeles County Natural History Museum for photographing the 1940 Model of Los Angeles,
which resides there.

My debt to the artist Robbert Flick should be evident throughout this essay. Without
his generosity and friendship this essay would not have been realized.